Archives: July 2004

The other night I saw Bill O’Reilly interviewing Michael Moore. As one would expect from such a collision of blowhards, more heat than light was generated. But there was one memorable moment: Moore asked O’Reilly whether he would be willing to sacrifice the life of his son or daughter to secure Fallujah. O’Reilly refused to answer; but he did say that he would readily give his own life to secure Fallujah.

So let me get this straight. If the insurgents in Fallujah announced that they would surrender on condition that they first be allowed to behead O’Reilly – and if U.S. intelligence sources assured him that the insurgents’ promises were reliable – would he happily turn himself over? Really?

If he would, then he’s plumb loco. If he wouldn’t, then he should stop lying.

Posted July 30th, 2004

Two more trailers are out for promising-looking movies. One is Batman Begins. Yes, I know – the last couple of Batman movies are painful memories. But this one is directed by Christopher Nolan of Memento and Insomnia fame. Plus, I’ve read an early draft of the script, and am pleased to report that this movie is a return to the darkness of the source material and is not played for laughs. The trailer makes it pretty clear what kind of welcome departure we’re in for.

The other is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s been a radio series, a pair of audioplays, a series of novels, and a TV show (all slightly different from one another), and now it’s finally coming to the big screen. This trailer, unlike the Batman one, doesn’t reveal much as to how the source material is being treated, but this interview with the writer leaves me cautiously optimistic.

Posted July 30th, 2004

I’ve been saying for years that so-called “intellectual property rights” are really attempts to claim ownership over the contents and activities of other people’s minds – and are thus radically inconsistent with property rights in the libertarian sense, which are grounded in the principle of self-ownership. (See the Molinari Institute’s anti-copyright page for the libertarian case against IP.)

The latest salvo from the IP thought police offers striking confirmation of my thesis. The Richmond Organization, a music publishing company that owns the legal rights to Woody Guthrie’s socialist anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” is suing the makers of the popular Bush-versus-Kerry cartoon that uses the song to satirise the American political process.

Their grounds? The cartoon “threatens to corrupt Guthrie’s classic – an icon of Americana – by tying it to a political joke; upon hearing the music people would think about the yucks, not Guthrie’s unifying message.” (See Jesse Walker’s story here.)

In short, this “Richmond Organization” is claiming the right to control what people think when they hear a song. What despot ever demanded more?

Posted July 30th, 2004

Randy Barnett asks how non-aggression in interpersonal ethics translates into non-intervention in foreign policy. I’m largely in agreement with what Gene Healy says in response here, but let me add a few points. (Much of this I’ve said before, but it’s worth saying again.)

I agree that the relationship is not of the straightforward form “if individuals shouldn’t invade the boundaries of other individuals, then states shouldn’t invade the boundaries of other states.” For one thing, a state does not have the same kind of right over its boundaries that individuals have over their own boundaries. (Indeed it couldn’t, so long as individuals with those sorts of rights exist within the state’s borders.)

Indeed, I would go farther. Since I regard states as inherently illegitimate and criminal organisations, I would say that a state has no rights at all; thus it has neither a right to invade nor a right not to be invaded.

Still, we can ask what we as citizens have a right to try to get the state to do. So long as we are ruled by states, and until we can succeed in shutting them down for good, we are justified in trying to direct them toward activities that protect rights rather than violate them. Hence we are within our rights to call the cops or lobby our legislators, even if those cops and those legislators have no right to hold the positions they hold.

So why isn’t it legitimate for citizens to direct their government’s armed forces to invade dictatorships and liberate the people there? Why isn’t that like calling the cops when you hear screams coming from next door?

I think there are two chief points of disanalogy. First: although invading a dictatorship is not per se a violation of rights, realistically the way the state is going to handle such an invasion will involve massive violence against innocent civilians. This is not merely a prudential objection to interventionism (though it is at least that – creating more recruits for our enemies is hardly in our interest); directing the state to behave in such an enormously rights-violating manner is itself a violation of the non-aggression principle. (For the limited scope of permissible “collateral damage,” see here and here. Anyway, I’m not just talking about “collateral damage”; given the incentive structures involved in state systems, sending the armed state into a territory is a sure recipe for deliberate rights-violations. The Abu Ghraib scandal was not an “anomaly”; it was the state manifesting its essential character.)

Second: war is the health of the state – that is, given how states actually operate, calling for military expansion means calling for the state to augment its power here at home. This means not only the increased taxation that Gene talks about, but also the eroding of civil liberties, and the fueling of the neofascist corporatism that Chris Sciabarra and Arthur Silber have explained so well. Citizens who urge their governments to engage in military interventions are calling for more rights-violations, not only abroad but at home.

Bentham rightly characterised war as “robbery, having murder for its instrument ... operating upon the largest possible scale ... committed by the ruling few in the conquering nation, on the subject many in both nations.” Does war necessarily have to take this form? Not at all; there are ways of conducting military operations that avoid these problems. But states by their nature will not conduct military operations in that way. Hence as libertarians we run the risk of violating the non-aggression principle if we direct our states into war.

I might be asked: don’t these arguments apply just as much to defensive as to invasive military action? I think they do apply to defensive action also – but not “just as much”: fewer foreign civilians will be killed in a purely defensive war, the lower costs of defense mean a lower tax burden, and the absence of prospects for plunder will moderate the neofascist aspects. On the other hand, admittedly, governments will probably curtail civil liberties even more in a defensive than in an invasive war. More importantly, however, the question really does not arise as to whether libertarians should favour military action in such a case, because there is simply zero chance of the state’s forgoing military action in the case of a direct attack, and so there would be no point in libertarians agitating for military action. It is only in the case of interventionism that the issue of what libertarians should support even arises.

Randy will presumably say that even if my case for noninterventionism is sound, it is merely a “pragmatic judgment of the sorts of rightful actions that will or will not yield good consequences” and “does not follow from Libertarian principles.” I disagree. The problem with sending the state to war is not just that doing so has bad consequences, but that the bad consequences are rights-violations. So for me, at any rate, the case against military intervention is an application of the nonaggression principle (though I think purely consequentialist considerations would also tell against such intervention). Nor am I simply claiming that a policy of nonintervention “indirectly leads better to the protection of rights than alternative policies.” I don’t see rights as something whose protection should be maximised (which would allow trade-offs whereby more rights protected over here makes up for a few rights being violated over there) but as side-constraints (à la Nozick) to be respected. The nonaggression principle is not a call to decrease the total amount of aggression in the universe by whatever means necessary; it is a call to refrain from aggression oneself. It is addressed to the individual human soul, not to some mythical central planning board with authority to dispose of human lives at will.

One further point in closing. I speak here for myself, not necessarily for other antiwar libertarians. Many antiwar libertarians take their positions for primarily consequentialist reasons; and many libertarians who opposed the invasion of Iraq favoured the invasion of Afghanistan (which I opposed). So they shouldn’t all be tarred with the brush of my extreme deontological views! (Strictly speaking, my views are really virtue-ethical rather than deontological, but that’s a long story.)

Posted July 28th, 2004

Badnarik’s website used to have an “issues” section which included, inter alia, a position statement on abortion. In it, Badnarik said that, after much wrestling with the issue, he was inclined to view abortion as a rights-violation. I can’t remember whether he said explicitly that it should be illegal, but that would seem a plausible inference.

Shortly after he won the nomination, the “issues” section abruptly vanished from the Badnarik website. When the “issues” section reappeared a few weeks later, there was no longer any mention of abortion. (And there still isn’t – I just checked.)

But today I notice that AOL’s candidate information page carries a new position statement on abortion. Badnarik now says that “the decision to abort must remain the sole province of the mother, the father, and their own consciences,” and is “not an issue for government intrusion.”

That’s a move in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. But I wonder what the story is.

Posted July 28th, 2004

One of my favorite musicals, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, is finally coming to the screen. Check out the trailer here.

Meanwhile, on the London stage, Webber is coming out with what looks to be his most Phantom-esque work since Phantom itself – The Woman in White, based on the Wilkie Collins novel. Wish I could be there to see it!

Posted July 28th, 2004

On September 6th, 1901 – almost exactly 100 years before the 9/11 attacks – President William McKinley was fatally shot by a somewhat bewildered Polish anarchist named Leon Czolgosz.

The results were in fact eerily similar to those of the 9/11 attacks: nationwide hysteria, fueled by the government and its claque, was unleashed against immigrants and ideological dissidents. All anarchists, whether revolutionary or pacific, were lumped together without distinction, as Muslims would be a century later; newspapers called for boycotting or exiling this “brood of vipers,” and laws were passed to bar anarchists from entering the country. It was in this atmosphere that Theodore Roosevelt, the most direct beneficiary of Czolgosz’s act, issued his famous pronunciamento: “The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind, and his is a deeper degree of criminality than any other.” (Compare Franklin Graham’s description of Islam as “a very evil and a very wicked religion.”)

Two recent additions to the Molinari Institute’s online library shed light on this dark period for civil liberties.

One is U.S. ex rel. Turner v. Williams, the 1904 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the expulsion of anarchist labour organiser John Turner, on the grounds that anyone who “avows himself to be an anarchist” must be assumed to mean the term “in the popular sense” of “one who seeks to overturn by violence all constituted forms and institutions of society and government,” and noted: “If that be not the fact, he should have introduced testimony to establish the contrary.” (In other words, the burden of proof was placed, unconstitutionally, on the defendant.) Appealing on Biblical grounds to the claim that “the realm where no human government is needed” (namely Eden) is barred by a “flaming brand,” the Court concluded that government “cannot be denied the power of self-preservation” and so booted out of the country a man against whom, by the Court’s own admission, no legal case had been made.

The other is Henry Bool’s Apology for His Jeffersonian Anarchism, a 1901 pamphlet which to my knowledge has not previously been made available online. Henry Bool of Ithaca, N.Y., was a successful and widely respected businessman whose well-known anarchist sympathies had aroused little concern – until the McKinley assassination, when the Ithaca Journal, with whose owner Bool had previously been on friendly terms, announced (rather disingenuously) that it had “learned with surprise and indignation” that some Ithaca residents were “believers in this dreadful doctrine” of anarchism. Identifying Bool specifically as “an avowed Anarchist,” the paper demanded legislation “to rid this land entirely of these emissaries of the Devil,” and urged citizens in the meantime “[n]ot to recognize these foes of our Republic on the streets; not to buy of them or sell to them; not to employ them or work in their employ.” While the paper was careful to express disapproval of any vigilante violence against anarchists, Bool considered such violence the likely outcome of the Journal’s “incendiary editorials” and “inflammatory pabulum,” and was not surprised when he soon began to receive anonymous threats through the mails.

When Bool wrote to the Journal to protest at seeing his peaceful and evolutionary Tuckerite brand of individualist anarchism conflated with the terroristic anarchism of Czolgosz (if Czolgosz even was an anarchist, which is debatable), the editors refused to publish his letters, telling him that they had had “quite enough of anarchists of whatever stripe” and would gladly “help hang or deport every one of them.” Bool’s pamphlet contains the paper’s O’Reilly-esque fulminations along with his own rejected replies. (I’m happy to report that, a century later, the Ithaca Journal takes a more favourable attitude toward Bool – though the paper’s own dishonourable conduct in his regard is neatly glossed over even now!)

Posted July 26th, 2004

Good news for B5 fans (and if you aren’t one, why aren’t you?): the Babylon 5 Movie Collection is now available for pre-order. This DVD set contains all the Babylon 5 TV-movies except Legend of the Rangers: To Live and Die in Starlight, which is supposed to come out on a separate disk at some point. (A Crusade set is also scheduled.)

For newcomers to the series: the right order to watch these films in is: The Gathering before Season 1; Thirdspace and In the Beginning between Seasons 4 and 5; River of Souls and A Call to Arms between Season 5 and the spin-off series Crusade. (Although In the Beginning takes place before Season 1, watching it early would disastrously spoil many, many surprises.)

For more information on the show, see my Babylon 5 page. (It’s one of the oldest sections of this website, so apologies for the incompetent handling of visual backgrounds; I’ll give it an overhaul someday ….) There’s also a new project on the way, titled Babylon 5: The Memory of Shadows and rumoured to be a feature film; I’ll report the news here when I learn it.

Posted July 23rd, 2004

I just today (well, yesterday by the time I’m writing this) came across the website of Lance Brown, who’s already running for the LP nomination in 2008 (the first presidential election in which he’ll be old enough to be eligible). It’s the first I’d heard of him, but then I don’t generally follow LP politics terribly closely (apart from my one stint as a delegate in ’96) so I’m probably behind the curve.

In any case, after spending some time perusing his website (actually a vast network of websites) I’m favourably impressed; on the basis of what I’ve read so far, he seems more like “my” kind of libertarian than were any of the three candidates for the LP nomination this year. In other words, he’s a Rand-reading computer geek with a left-friendly, feminist-friendly, labour-friendly, Green-friendly approach.

That’s basically the approach that characterised the libertarian movement in the glorious 19th century, before the rise of state socialism scared libertarians into their long and ugly 20th-century alliance with conservatives. One of Brown’s many websites is called GreenLiberty.org, advertised as being dedicated to “pursuing Green values using Libertarian principles”; I was particularly curious to have a look at it, but it seems to be out of service for now. However, for Brown’s general outlook see his article The Essential Hurdle for Libertarians, which says the things that libertarians should be saying more often.

I’m a bit grumpy, though, over his admission that he isn’t “very well-read” in Austrian economics. Come 2008, he’d better have read up on the Austrians if he’s going to be answering the hard economics questions. That’s especially true if he wants to reach out to the left; those constituents will be wanting to know why they should vote for a free-marketer like Brown rather than for Nader or the Green candidate. Perhaps he should start with Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People. (As long as I’m grumping: Brown also has a fondness for keeping pronouns in the subjective case regardless of what this does to the grammar of the sentence. Argh! Still, I bet he can pronounce “nuclear” correctly.)

Anyway, Brown looks like a breath of fresh air, at least to us bleeding-heart libertarians who would like to see the movement lose its right-wing image and extend its appeal to the anti-authoritarian left. He’s definitely a candidate worth watching.

Posted July 22nd, 2004

Tuesday's paper promised on the cover, “Find out where the presidential candidates stand.” But upon turning to the story I find that the views listed are those of only two of the presidential candidates – Bush and Kerry.

There are at least two other presidential candidates who are running credible nationwide campaigns and whose views deserve coverage: Libertarian Michael Badnarik and Independent Ralph Nader.

The two 19th-century parties, Democrat and Republican, owe their monopolistic control of the political process to the mainstream media’s willingness to give them exclusive coverage. Candidates from other parties are less popular because voters don’t hear about them in the media – and then the media justify not covering these candidates because they’re less popular. This self-reinforcing cycle keeps establishment politicians in power, and denies the voters a genuine range of options.

For example, Badnarik and Nader each support (in different ways) a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the quagmire in Iraq; Bush and Kerry do not.

Roderick T. Long

Posted July 21st, 2004

The lies about Herbert Spencer just won’t die. Like creatures in a horror movie, no matter how many times you kill them they just keep coming back. The latest recycled slander against the valiant old libertarian turns up in Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism; for one more try with the mallet and stake, see my reply here.

In other news: on LRC today, Pat Buchanan writes: “Since Henry Wallace, then, 60 years ago, no vice president has been dumped.” Um ... what about Gerald Ford dumping Rockefeller for Dole in 1976?

Posted July 21st, 2004

Before the fall of communism, Republicans were fond of pointing out that people were risking their lives to get out of communist countries, and risking their lives to get in to capitalist countries. This, they insisted, was all one needed to know in order to evaluate the respective merits of the two systems.

Interestingly, the Republicans have been remarkably slow to appeal to that test lately – perhaps because this time the results would not favour their position.

As Lew Rockwell points out, in the days of Saddam Hussein “people from all over the region wanted to come to Iraq”; by contrast, under the American puppet régime “those who come are there for jihad, while the flow otherwise runs in the opposite direction.”

And that’s no surprise. Iraq under Hussein was one of the most liberal societies in the Arab world. Of course that isn’t saying much, and it’s quite consistent with the undeniable truth that Hussein was a murderous, dictatorial thug. The fact that most Iraqis were better off under that murderous, dictatorial thug than they are under the American occupation is a shameful indictment of U.S. foreign policy.

Those of a Panglossian disposition may insist that Iraq’s current wretched condition is merely temporary, a result of the war, and that in a short while, once the last pockets of resistance have been stamped out, it will become a shining, free, prosperous oasis to which immigrants will eagerly flow. Soviet apologists were saying the same thing about Russia for seventy years.

But what is the plan for achieving this miracle? As La Boétie and Hume have taught us, no ruler can maintain power by force alone. And as Rockwell reminds us, Hussein didn’t. But the U.S. is trying to. Only failure can result.

Charles Dunoyer began his career as a dissident journalist bitterly attacking the reigning monarchy in France. After its overthrow, the excesses of its republican and imperial successors eventually led him to call for the monarchy’s restoration. I used to attribute this to a weakening of Dunoyer’s libertarian principles, and to some extent I still think it was. But I understand how he felt.

Posted July 17th, 2004

Walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit;for they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh,but they that are after the spirit the things of the spirit.

– Romans 8: 4-5.

Religious conservatives are a puzzle. They like to denounce socialism and ethical relativism; they also like to denounce the materialistic conception of human beings as mere animals. They often profess skepticism at the findings of evolutionary biology.

And yet, in practice, they enthusiastically embrace all the vices they purport to attack.

They tend, for example, to accept “divine command theory,” which holds that what makes something right (or wrong) is the fact that God commands (or forbids) it. The upshot of such a view, of course, is that God’s commands must be viewed as completely arbitrary and random. After all, if God had reasons for commanding and prohibiting as he does, then those reasons, rather than God’s will, would be the basis of the action’s rightness or wrongness – an intolerable restriction on God’s “freedom.” Hence such conservatives are as hostile as any relativist to the notion of a rationally intelligible moral order. They too regard morality as being a matter of groundless whim; they just think the whim is God’s rather than ours.

Despite their surface opposition to socialism, they typically embrace both a socialistic ethics, subordinating the fulfillment of the individual to the collective good of society, and a socialistic cosmology, denying the possibility of order emerging except through top-down control. Such commitments must inevitably corrupt one’s politics in a socialist direction. (This is why it is a mistake to suppose, as many paleolibertarians do, that religious conservatism can be combined in a stable fashion with political libertarianism. Where their treasure is, there will their heart – and sooner or later their politics – be also.)

One would think they had never heard of the idea that human beings possess a spiritual dimension which transcends their merely animal functions. Yet this is precisely the idea for which they have always claimed to stand.

Posted July 16th, 2004

A correspondent asks me what rights the Federal Marriage Amendment would have violated. Gays would still have had the right to have private, non-state-sanctioned marriage ceremonies, he argues; they would simply have forfeited governmental benefits to which no one has any right anyway.

I think this is too quick. These “governmental benefits” include rights that any couple either should have (e.g., the right not to have employer-paid insurance for one’s spouse counted as taxable income, or a citizen’s right not to have his/her noncitizen spouse deported) or should be able to contract into (e.g., the right to make medical decisions for one’s spouse when necessary). These are not special state-conferred privileges we’re talking about. (Of course marriage does come with such privileges also. So does being a police officer or a physician – but that’s no argument for banning gays from being police officers or physicians. Instead we should be fighting to get rid of the privileges.)

Wouldn’t civil unions solve such problems just as well as marriage? Maybe. But such a “separate but equal” approach strikes me as repellent. What would we say if black couples could have “civil unions” but only white couples could legally “marry”? (And in response to those who reject this analogy on linguistic grounds, arguing that marriages are heterosexual unions by definition, see my post from a year ago: Who Defends Marriage?.)

In the present case, however, debating the merits of civil unions is beside the point, for
the Federal Marriage Amendment would arguably have banned civil unions as well. Recall the actual wording of the proposed Amendment:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

As I read this language, the Amendment would have forbidden states to offer even civil unions to gays. After all, it forbids construing any state law (present or future) to confer “marital status or the legal incidents thereof” on “unmarried couples or groups.” I take the choice of “or” rather than “and” to mean that even laws conferring only the “legal incidents” of marital status (rather than marital status itself) are forbidden – and that would seem to ban civil unions too.

For that matter, it’s not at all clear to me that the Amendment couldn’t have been used to ban private ceremonies as well. The second sentence of the Amendment is a restriction on state and federal law (or construal thereof), but the first sentence is completely open-ended: couldn’t it be read as authorising the federal government to interfere with same-sex marriages wherever in the country they occur, just as the 13th Amendment is generally interpreted as authorising the federal government to interfere with slavery wherever in the country it occurs? This wouldn’t be a Spoonerite reading of the FMA, of course – it conflicts with Spooner’s Seventh, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Rules of constitutional interpretation – but we all know it isn’t Spoonerites who would have been doing the interpreting. In 1886, Lillian Harman and Edwin C. Walker were imprisoned for conducting their own non-state-sanctioned marriage ceremony; would the Rick Santorums and Roy Moores of this world be more lenient on same-sex couples who did likewise?

Posted July 15th, 2004

Senator Rick Santorum, chief supporter of the Federal Marriage Amendment, has said that his effort “was not about hate” but was simply a matter of “doing the right thing for the basic glue that holds society together.”

Given Santorum’s infamous comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality, one may be forgiven for doubting his sincerity when he denies being motivated by prejudice. But suppose we give him the benefit of the doubt, and grant that he was merely seeking to defend society’s matrimonial glue. What would one have to believe in order to accept Santorum’s position?

First, one would have to believe that marriage in its present form is necessary for the preservation of the social order. But why should anybody believe that? Marriage in its present form – as a heterosexual, monogamous union of legal equals – is the exception, not the rule, in history. (Has the Senator read his Bible?)

Second, one would have to believe that allowing homosexual couples to marry would threaten the status of heterosexual marriage. But why would it do so? Is anybody really going to say, “Gee, I was all ready to marry someone of the opposite sex, but now that gay marriage is legal I won’t”? If anything, providing recognition of homosexual marriage probably strengthens the institution of heterosexual marriage by reinforcing the legitimacy of marriage per se. (Indeed, one might well think that is a better argument against gay marriage than any Santorum has offered!)

Finally, even if the first two points were to be granted, one would have to believe that government has a right to restrict the free choices of individuals in order to promote socially beneficial institutions – which amounts to believing that government has the right to enslave the individual for the sake of the collective. It’s easy to see how a Communist or a Nazi could accept this third premise. But it’s harder to see how Santorum can justify such a collectivist and authoritarian delusion after writing the following words:

To the Founders, these God-given truths – that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” – are no more open to discuss or debate than the laws of gravity. They are simply there, part of the created order. And because they are divinely sanctioned, it followed that even if a wicked and depraved majority tried to subvert them in the name of “democracy,” the moral minority would be obliged to resist the majority’s wishes in the name of moral truth.

On the issue of gay marriage (and many other issues, of course), Santorum has precisely attempted to organise a “wicked and depraved majority” in a coalition to subvert a minority’s claim to “equal and inalienable rights” – thereby proving that the principles of ’76 mean more to him as tools of rhetorical manipulation than as genuine living commitments. Happily, in this case God hath brought the counsel of the heathen to naught.

Posted July 15th, 2004

So the Federal Marriage Amendment has failed. Thank the gods for small mercies!

This isn’t over, though. The Republicans are threatening to make this “an election year issue” – that is, they’ll be trying to get more bigots elected so they can bring the Amendment up again next year. Still, for now it’s pleasant to see Congress frustrating the Bush gang’s tyrannical ambitions on some issue. (And of course the Amendment’s supporters have also forfeited any claim to be defenders of decentralisation.)

Maurois’s book is the classic work on Hugo’s life; Robb’s more recent book, while occasionally marred by loony Freudian interpretations, has the advantage of access to previously unknown documents and files. The two books together offer a valuable parallax view of one of the 19th century’s most fascinating thinkers – novelist, poet, playwright, artist, and political activist.

Hugo’s life was not a happy one. Three of his children died young; the fourth went insane. His brother did both. His wife betrayed him with his enemy. His ideas were mocked and ridiculed by his peers. He was constantly spied on and in danger of arrest (Robb’s research shows that Hugo’s alleged “paranoia” about this was in fact well grounded). His opposition to the Second Empire forced him into years of exile. (Rand used to give France’s shoddy treatment of Hugo during life, followed by his deification in death, as an example of a “country’s boasting of the great artists it martyred”; the career of Richard Halley in Atlas Shrugged is partly inspired by Hugo’s.)

All the same, the person whose fate most moved me was Hugo’s incredibly longsuffering mistress Juliette Drouet, who wasted her life and considerable literary talent worshipping a man who, whatever his merits in other respects, quite frankly did not deserve her.

Both books have their failings. Their attention, perhaps inevitable in a biography, to the often eccentric and sordid details of Hugo’s personality and personal life, tends to eclipse Hugo’s actual writings – and the authors’ occasional analyses of those writings strike me as remarkably flat-footed. (It is particularly unfortunate that so few of Hugo’s works are available in English – though, happily, that is beginning to change.) Nevertheless, much of the excitement and strangeness of Hugo’s marvelous vision comes through.

It is startling to recall that France once had thinkers of the calibre of Hugo, Bastiat, Proudhon, Tocqueville, Guizot, Lamartine, and Dunoyer serving in its legislature. What a contrast to France’s legislature today – let alone ours.

Posted July 14th, 2004

After the libertarian (r)evolution, when there’s no more news about presidents and senators and occupation forces, what will fill our newspapers?

After all, as Gertrude Himmelfarb teaches us, the political realm is the Realm of the Rational. So after the death of politics, as Karl Hess called it, won’t we be thrown back on what Himmelfarb considers the irrational “inanimate forces” of civil society?

On the other hand, Hess described politics as a form of “residual magic” that “denies the rational nature of man.” So maybe, just maybe, there’s scope for rational activity outside the political sphere. And in a libertarian society some of the front page space currently devoted to blather about the State might give some attention to actual, rational achievements of the sort that under the current régime get buried somewhere in the back pages.

Which brings me to a subject far more interesting, and far better deserving of respectful attention, than the sanguinary antics of the ruling class. I refer of course to concrete.

The concrete of the future, that is. Concrete that’s stronger, more flexible, and – would you believe transparent?

Posted July 9th, 2004

Jacob Levy has responded to my previous post. Concerning the analogy I there drew between confused criticisms of anti-interventionism in military policy and confused criticisms of anti-interventionism in the economy, Jacob writes that it’s “fallacious to treat the cases as so closely analogous” and indeed that I have “usefully offered one of the neatest accounts I’ve seen of the fallacy that leads people to treat strict non-interventionism as a matter of libertarian principle” – since “Politics is not economics, and international politics is really not economics, and terrorism is really, really not economics.”

Jacob has usefully offered another example of the mistake for which I chided him earlier: criticising antiwar libertarians (in this case, me) for something other than what they said. In the present case he has misunderstood the point of my analogy. The point was not to argue that, just as libertarians oppose intervention in the economy, so they should oppose intervention in foreign affairs. Indeed, as I said explicitly in my original post, the purpose of that post was not to argue for the antiwar position at all, but only to complain of Jacob’s mischaracterising of that position.

The analogy I was making was thus not between the case for economic libertarianism and the case for antiwar libertarianism. Rather, the analogy I was making was between an (imaginary, and to libertarians obviously ludicrous) bad argument against economic libertarianism and an (all too real, and alas, apparently not obviously ludicrous to all libertarians) bad argument against antiwar libertarianism.

However, since Jacob has raised the question of the former analogy, let’s consider whether there is one.

One possible misunderstanding needs to be gotten out of the way right off the bat. It might be thought that antiwar libertarians are treating military intervention per se as a violation of the nonaggression principle. We are not. Insofar as military intervention is being conducted in order to overthrow or defang an unjust régime, it could in principle be justified as defensive rather than initiatory force.

But let’s leave all that aside and asks whether, in purely economic terms, the libertarian arguments against economic intervention apply at all to military intervention. And surely they do. Remember, this is government action we’re talking about; given the severe informational and incentival problems that governments inherently face, the odds that they will intervene where and how they ought are just about nil – and the results of such failures are much more sanguinary than an inefficient Post Office.

As David Friedman reminds us: “It is difficult to run a successful interventionist policy, and as libertarians we do not expect the government to do difficult things well.” (Machinery of Freedom, p. 215.) Jacob complains that in its handling (i.e., losing) of the Iraq War “the Bush Administration has failed basic tests of competence in policymaking and execution, and of trusteeship of long-term interests like alliances and trade negotiations and moral credibility.” This apparently came as a surprise to him – whereas it’s exactly what the antiwar libertarians expected and predicted. Why should states stop acting like states when they’re fighting terrorism? (Jacob thinks Kerry will be better; I’m not sure why.)

But the parallel between military interventionism and economic interventionism is stronger still. Back in 2002 I argued as follows, and the argument still strikes me as compelling:

Ludwig von Mises used to argue that a market economy regulated by governmental intervention, hailed by many as a middle path between socialism and laissez-faire, is an inherently unstable system: each additional interference with private commerce distorts the price system, leading to economic dislocations that must be addressed either by repealing the first intervention or by adding a second, and so on ad infinitum.

I’m reminded of Mises’ argument every time the boosters of America’s current rush to empire tell us: “Well sure, maybe you dovish types are right when you say that the 9/11 attacks could have been avoided if we’d pursued a less provocative Middle East policy. But it’s too late to debate that issue now. We can’t turn back the clock; we have to deal with the situation as it currently exists. Given the threat we face now, we have to pursue that threat and eliminate it.”

The problem with this argument is that it’s timeless. Hawks were saying things like this long before 9/11, about the threats that we faced then. Every time America goes off on one of its bombing or invading romps, resentment grows among the bombed and invaded. From this resentment sprout new threats to America's security. To protect against these threats, America engages in further bombing and invading, which creates still more resentment, which breeds still new threats, prompting still more bombing and invading, and so on ad infinitum.

Mises’ insight that interventions breed more interventions is as true in foreign policy as it is in domestic economy. And just as the logical endpoint of the cycle of economic interventions is complete socialism, so the logical endpoint of the cycle of military interventions is world conquest. In both cases, the only way to avoid the goal is to stop the cycle.

Now Jacob’s objection to this line of reasoning is that it assumes terrorist behaviour is predictable in the same way that the behaviour of economic actors responding to a price control is predictable – that it ignores subjective factors like ideology. For Jacob there’s “no invisible hand that leads the radical Islamists of the world to respond violently to our wrongs rather than our rights, or even more frequently to our wrongs than to our rights.”

Invisible hand? I’m talking about a visible fist. And I don’t see how I’m ignoring ideology; I’m just making the quite ordinary observation that people are more likely to respond violently to people who attack them than to people who don’t. That doesn’t mean unprovoked attacks don’t occur; it just means that provoking produces more violent responses than non-provoking. If what the terrorists hate about us is our freedom and prosperity, why aren’t they attacking Switzerland? Can Jacob really claim with a straight face that U.S. foreign policy has nothing to do with al-Qaeda’s behaviour?

Suppose I go out into any street in the world – Peoria or Fallujah – and start randomly punching people on the street. I feel fairly confident in predicting that the percentage of people who hit, kick, or shoot me will be far higher among those I hit than among those I didn’t hit. As I wrote in my very first blog entry ever:

Do the terrorists hate us for our (relatively) libertarian culture, or for our un-libertarian foreign policy? Well, pretty obviously, both. The question is whether they would be motivated to give their lives in an attack on this country if they had only the cultural grudge against us, rather than the military grudge as well? Sure, I imagine some would still be willing. ... All the same, I for one find it hard to imagine al-Qaeda having quite as easy a time recruiting suicide hijackers on the basis of a mere horror of Baywatch.

And recruitment is really the issue here. Jacob thinks it’s “simply untrue that the Iraqi sanctions prompted 9/11,” since those sanctions were not “a wrong of any great importance to Bin Laden.” Now I don’t know whether bin Laden cared about the Iraqi sanctions or not, but the sanctions certainly were one more grievance that helped to fuel resentment against the U.S. in the Islamic world. I rather suspect that bin Laden was thrilled with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, since it simultaneously hurts one enemy (Hussein) and makes another (the U.S.) look bad – while bringing much closer the prospect of a fundamentalist régime in Iraq. But bin Laden has nevertheless loudly proclaimed his outrage over the invasion, because he’s playing to an audience, and that audience isn’t us.

What matters is not so much what bin Laden cares about as what his potential recruits care about – and I don’t see anything “mechanistic” about the assumption that there might be correlations between a) the amount of damage the U.S. inflicts on the Muslim world, b) the number of Muslims who feel angry and resentful toward the U.S., and c) the number of potential al-Qaeda recruits. This isn’t any sort of praxeological law; it’s just common sense. Assuming that there’s no such correlation, that anybody who becomes a terrorist would have been a terrorist anyway, seems enormously unrealistic. Indeed, in the context of defending U.S. foreign policy it seems like wishful thinking of, well, Panglossian proportions.

Posted July 7th, 2004

My friend Jacob Levy, in answer to a query from my friend Aeon Skoble, writes that he won’t be voting for Michael Badnarik because Badnarik’s position on the War on Terror “falls below my threshold of a responsible understanding of the state of the world right now. It’s out of the realm of policy disagreement and into the realm of a view of the world that I can’t responsibly wish the inhabitant of the White House to hold.”

The object of Jacob’s condemnation is Badnarik’s view that the 9/11 attacks were a response to previous U.S. interventions in the Middle East, and that continuing such interventions does more to exacerbate the terrorist threat than to combat it.

While I regard Badnarik’s position on this matter as quite correct, my present purpose is not to defend that position (I think the antiwar libertarians have already made that case overwhelmingly), but rather to take issue with the way Jacob characterises that position.

Jacob describes Badnarik’s position as a “silly Panglossianism about politics that says, ‘Any wrong must be traceable to another wrong; if only we never did anything wrong, no one would ever do anything wrong to us.’”

That would indeed be a silly position. But it is not Badnarik’s position, nor is it the position of antiwar libertarians generally. The following three propositions are distinct:

a) The kind of interventionist foreign policy the U.S. regularly pursues is likelier to provoke terrorist attacks than to deter them.

b) The specific attacks the U.S. suffered on 9/11 were primarily a response to its interventionist foreign policy, and the further interventions with which the U.S. has responded are making future terrorist attacks more rather than less likely.

c) The U.S. would never suffer any attacks if it did not have an interventionist foreign policy.

Note that (a) does not imply (b), and (b) does not imply (c). We antiwar libertarians have been defending propositions (a) and (b), but in doing so we are not committed to (c) – and no antiwar libertarian known to me has endorsed (c).

Compare the following three propositions:

d) The kind of interventionist economic policy the U.S. regularly pursues is likelier to provoke economic crises than to deter them.

e) The Great Depression was primarily the result of the U.S. government’s interventionist economic policy during the 1920s, and the further economic interventions with which the U.S. government responded served mainly to lengthen the Depression rather than alleviating it.

f) The U.S. would never suffer any economic crises – i.e., there would be no earthquakes, no floods, no hurricanes, etc. – if it did not have an interventionist economic policy.

Most libertarians accept propositions (d) and (e); but of course this does not commit them to the absurdity à la Fourier of (f). Isn’t accusing antiwar libertarians of Panglossian silliness a bit like accusing libertarians in general of not believing in earthquakes and floods?

Posted July 6th, 2004

Today is the day that Americans are supposed to celebrate the founding of their country. This we cannot do, since the country that was founded on July 4th, 1776, no longer exists. See my Independence Day editorial from last year.

Posted July 4th, 2004

Ronald Reagan spoke with such apparent sincerity about free enterprise,
free trade, deregulation, cutting taxes, and downsizing government that he
somehow managed to convince both his supporters and his opponents that his
administration had actually enacted some of those policies.

In reality, the Reagan presidency’s actions were diametrically opposed to
its rhetoric.

Reagan’s 1981 “tax cut” was offset by higher Social Security taxes,
resulting in a net tax increase for most taxpayers. He then followed it
up with the 1982 TEFRA Act, the largest tax increase in American history.
The federal government’s tax intake was $252 billion higher in 1986 than
in 1980.

The Reagan administration increased federal spending from $591 billion to
$990 billion, the deficit from $74 billion to $200 billion, and the
federal debt from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion. Entitlement spending
soared from $197 billion in 1981 to $477 billion in 1987.

Despite paying lip service to free trade, Reagan pursued a far more
aggressively protectionist policy than his predecessors. He did continue
the Carter administration’s deregulation initiatives, but launched no new
ones, and reneged on his pledge to rein in the federal bureaucracy.
The number of civilian government workers rose by 230,000 during the
course of his presidency.

The real Reagan legacy is that, thanks to Reagan’s pro-market rhetoric,
the free market unfairly gets the blame for the harmful results of his
anti-market policies. In that sense, Reagan perhaps did more harm to the
cause of genuine free enterprise than any President in American history.

Roderick T. Long

(And I didn’t even get into Reagan’s ghastly record on civil liberties or foreign policy ….)

Some would blame the Reagan administration’s economic failures on Congress rather than on Reagan himself. I don’t think this defense works. Reagan signed those bills; he even proposed some of them. And once in office he failed even to mention the various pro-market reforms for which he had promised to fight. Instead he gave us pseudo-market reforms like the “deregulation” (actually a risk-encouraging tax-funded insurance scheme) of the savings and loan industry. (Nor was there anything especially pro-market about his earlier reign as California governor. A penchant for quoting Bastiat and Mises is not a substitute for actual policy.)

For years, allegedly pro-market Republicans have blamed the socialistic policies of Republican Presidencies on Democrats in Congress – and likewise have blamed the socialistic policies of Republicans in Congress on Democratic Presidencies. Well, the Republicans have controlled both Congress and the White House for some time now, with no discernible movement in a market direction. The game is up, folks.

Posted July 3rd, 2004

Contrary to what the news media have been blaring, the most important news story today is not the sordid kangaroo-legal jousting between the deposed Iraqi despot and the puppets of the victorious American despot.

Of far deeper significance, in the long run, are the revelations coming to light – dazzling, glorious light – one billion miles away. The discoveries of the Cassini probe will be remembered when the names of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein are long forgotten. It is not people of their ilk who will take human civilisation to the stars.

There was a time when human beings crouched in caves, at the mercy of any pestilence and any storm. Could men such as Bush and Hussein have brought them out of the cave and up to Saturn? There’s your proof that another kind of men do exist; think of them and forget Bush and Hussein.

It’s often said that signals from space come to us from the past. In this case, they come from our future.